We got up with the alarm at 07:00 today, although I was awake before it went off. M. slept through the whole night, but I haven’t quite got there yet. The day began rainy and we had to have breakfast inside rather than out on the patio. Showers were intermittent during the morning. I managed to walk to the DIN office without any rain, but it began again as the meeting got started.
Today we had a full program of technical ad hoc group discussions. Topics included measuring angle-dependent lens flare, low light performance with image stabilisation, depth measurement, and image resolution. In the first topic we had a guest from ISO TC 172 Optics and Photonics to talk to us about their standard for measuring veiling glare, which is a similar technical issue, and we planned to align our standards to be consistent with one another.
During a mid-morning break in the meeting I sketched the Brandenburg Gate, using a photo I took last night as a reference.
I went for another walk during the lunch break, exploring some of the neighbourhood nearby. It was mostly residential areas with blocks of flats, but I walked along a canal for a bit as well, which was nice as it was lined with large, leafy chestnut trees. I only identified them because of all of the fallen chestnuts on the ground!
After the meeting this evening was the social function. This was held on the 10th floor roof terrace of the DIN building, which had a decent view across Berlin. We could see the expanse of the Tiergarten and the surrounding buildings, though I think the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate were hidden from view. The food was a cold buffet of dishes including a pasta with chicken, a quinoa salad with mini strips of schnitzel, falafels, and some cheese and vegetable pastries, with stewed rhubarb with yoghurt as a sweet. Not fancy, but pretty good. We chatted with some of the other meeting participants who had brought their wives as well, then did a big group photo, which the partners sat out of, and M ended up taking the photos so that all the meeting attendees could be in it.
We didn’t stay too long, leaving to take advantage of the long twilight and go for a bit of a walk down Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s famous shopping boulevarde. We went as far as the Hard Rock Cafe, which we went into to look at the music memorabilia. Then we returned back to our hotel, stopping along the way to get a salted caramel cinnamon roll from a fancy cinnamon roll shop. They looked so god I couldn’t resist. I ate it in our room, and it was delicious.
Also at the hotel we got help from a guy at reception to print out some tickets for Prague Castle which I bought online today. I thought we should go see the castle when we’re in Prague on Saturday, and not waste any time queueing up to buy tickets there. They online tickets had to be physically printed though, so I had to find a way and thankfully the hotel could do it for us. The backup was getting someone at the DIN offices to print it, but now I won’t have to do that.